Berries!

Hope everyone we know loves jam! 

As much as we love summer berries, we have never actually gone and picked them ourselves. I decided we needed to remedy this, since the boys have had a little practice from the backyard blueberry bushes.
We went to Sauvie Island Farms, which is my new favorite.

Ohhhh, I'm a little berry pickin' fellow, la la la....

I was a little worried the boys wouldn't be into it, but boy was I wrong. 

Stop wasting time taking pictures, Mom, let's go!

It didn't take long for us to get into the swing of picking raspberries. 

I don't know what kind of magic world these raspberries came from, but I'm telling you, the bushes had basically zero thorns. The way I remember it, when I was a kid, it was like raspberry bushes were the dragon Malificent turns into at the end of Sleeping Beauty and I had to do some serious battle just to get some delicious berries. Not the case anymore apparently. 

It took us a pretty short time to get a ridiculous amount of raspberries in our flat. 

Interestingly, I thought Chris would be rather indifferent to the raspberries since he wasn't previously much of a raspberry aficionado, but after tasting a couple of these, he was the one who encouraged us all to get as many as possible!

After we had as many raspberries as we could carry, we continued over to the blueberry bushes. 

Once again, we had very little trouble finding tons and tons of beautiful ripe berries. 

Chris took the initiative to use Graham's little newsboy cap as a blueberry receptacle. 

At the end of our time at the farm, we felt pretty good about what we'd accomplished!

A satisfying haul indeed.

Almost too much to hold on to!

Now comes the fun part- turning these things into jam and stuff! In the short term, they are being put to good use in some very satisfying pancakes.